By Will Trafford
Research in Motion, the parent company of Blackberry has announced co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis will stand-down from their roles at the troubled smartphone manufacturer.
Lazaridis who co-founded the company with 3 others in 1984 - and Balsillie, will be replaced by RIM's chief operations officer Thorsten Heins.
RIM's meteoric rise and fall reads like a modern day Silicon Valley soap opera. The company's success in mobile began in the late 1990s with the introduction of its Blackberry products - allowing mainly corporate clients to replace aging pager systems with two-way messaging and data devices. Blackberry's server products were also sold to corporations who sought highly-secure mobile email systems.
In recent years Blackberry's popularity has begun to slide, losing market share to the likes of Apple's iPhone and Google Android devices. In 2011 RIM announced it expected its revenue to drop for the first time in more than nine years.
The company has been marred by a series of poorly received products. In April 2011 RIM released its first tablet computer, the 'Playbook', running its newly acquired QNX operating system. The device was largely panned for not sporting an integrated email client, a feature that had become synonymous as the main drawcard of the Canadian manufacturer.
This, coupled with the company's failure to deliver any smartphone devices running the new operating system has seen the company's stock price fall over 70 percent in less than two years.
The declining stock price, as well as expectations the company will fail to deliver a Blackberry 10 device until Q4 2012 has launched intense takeover speculation that Lazaridis and Balsillie and board chairmen have failed to quell.
Seattle-based Microsoft, Amazon and Korea's Samsung are all speculated suitors for the company.
Although declining market share and an aging product line-up may not be hugely attractive to some of the more innovative providers in the mobile space, RIM reportedly holds one of the largest patent portfolios in the wireless business. Last year Google announced plans to acquire Motorola's cellphone business in what it claimed was a defensive move to stave off litigation from the likes of Apple and Microsoft.
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